The rise of the remote husband, The Economist, April 4, 2024

All over the country, among the well-heeled and well-educated, a new trend appears to be emerging. When the wives head out in the morning, to their offices, classrooms or hospitals, they are waving goodbye to their husbands, who remain at home.

Interesting piece. I actually did this for a year or so before the pandemic—I convinced my old boss to let me work from home, because everything I did was online and I wasn’t being paid enough to schlep into the city every day. Now my wife and I are both completely remote, but I do most of the cooking, kitchen stuff, and lawn care.

Working from home, in some circles, used to be considered something women did, and it would be held to some extent against you—at least my father picked up on that gender dynamic when he used to work in New York City. It’s interesting to see an increasing number of men working remotely, and because of their more flexible time, probably taking on more domestic duties too. Maybe this is a good thing to come out of the pandemic.

Old Cows, New Meat, Ambrook Research, Hannah Macready, Feb 1, 2024

This article reminded me of one I wrote awhile ago about a really great steak we had at a steakhouse in Croatia, which led me to write a whole article about steak. One element of that was older cows and dairy cows.

It turns out some of the inexpensive, ungraded beef in discount grocery stores is probably dairy cow beef, as are some of the steaks at cheaper steakhouses. But it’s not eaten all that widely, nor is it widely considered great beef. Is there a good reason for that? Maybe not.

Some farmers and chefs argue that dairy cow meat simply faces a branding problem. Most of what we value as good traits in a steak, such as lean, tender meat, and soft, white marbling, can be achieved in dairy cows if they are given the right food and lifestyle, and harvested at the right age, in the right health.

Blue Hill at Stone Barns in Tarrytown, New York, even goes as far as claiming dairy cow meat is “better than Wagyu” when done right. Blue Hill’s head chef, Dan Barber said in a written response that, “It’s [about] giving the cow, who might not be an Angus or Wagyu or an esteemed beef cattle breed, the chance to put on fat and muscle and develop pronounced and idiosyncratic flavoring.”

Barber believes dairy cow meat is misunderstood, sent to the cultural wayside by Western standards and the rise of industrialized farming. “Tender cuts with colorless fat from young beef cattle are the American standard. We’re hoping to change what diners are coveting,” he wrote.

It’s hard to tell, honestly, how much of this is trying to spark a trend, and how much is real, unfiltered opinion. But it’s interesting and certainly plausible that what we think of as “good beef” is just a subset of what beef can be.

Aside from the culinary question, it’s also a tricky and difficult business for dairy farmers to get really good dairy cow beef at a price that makes it worthwhile:

Yet, even in cases where the meat is picked up by a chef, beef sales remain a relatively low margin business for dairy farmers. According to Schaefer, the contribution of cull cow revenue generally amounts to around 4 percent of total dairy operations.

When a farmer can sell a culled cow, which is only possible if she died relatively young and healthy, how much they get paid is pretty opaque, and prone to market forces.

More broadly, it’s funny how you can read this as “hippies are using ‘retired dairy cow beef is sustainable’ as a shoe in the door to taking away our beef!” or whatever, or as “we can create a viable new market that makes better use of our resources and livestock.” You know me: I like markets, and if there’s a financial path to something that’s also lighter on the environment, let’s do it.

Museums Are Helping Keep Arcade Games Alive, And Here’s How, The Gamer, Dominic Allen, April 21, 2024

Arcade titles are by far the hardest games to preserve. They wear down more quickly, emulation can’t quite match the original experience, unlike their console counterparts, and other factors, such as a lack of port to home consoles and localisation outside their home countries, may further complicate preservation. Last month, I had an opportunity to speak with Martin Reinhardt, an arcade technician for the Strong Museum of Play.

I wrote recently about a new pinball arcade in Purcellville, Virginia, and I think I found this article while reading random bits and pieces about arcades. Of course, you can’t emulate pinball at all. But any sort of arcade machine is an experience unto itself.

This isn’t just preservation by doing whatever you can to keep the things running. It’s complicated, museum-quality work:

“If we have to touch up artwork on the side of a game, we don’t just sand off the old artwork and put a new sticker on the side,” Reinhardt says. “We have a conservator who applies a barrier layer…we’ll do our touch-up work, and that’s recorded, and the reason why is, let’s say 50 years from now, we find out that the paint we used to do that touch-up actually can cause damage to the artifact, because of that barrier layer we can remove that paint and then the next conservator can re-touch it up again.”

This is the coolest detail to me, and I’ve thought for years that 3D printing seems like a breakthrough in repair of old but valuable or collectible consumer products. I’m surprised we don’t hear more about this sort of thing:

Another big aspect of preserving games at The Strong is 3D printing. “With this new 3D printing initiative, we have been able to save several games that otherwise would not be playable by guests,” Reinhardt says. “We have one out on the floor right now of Bally Hill Climb and some extensive 3D printing work for this motorcycle.”

For those unaware, Bally Hill Climb is an early 70s game in which you guide a small physical motorcycle along the hillside. It’s an old electro-mechanical game, and those tend to have weak plastic parts. That’s where the 3D printing initiative really shines, reproducing these old plastics to keep these 60s and 70s games playable.

Read the whole delightful piece.

Crepe Murder Is The South’s Worst Gardening Crime, Southern Living, Steve Bender, November 17, 2022

Any indiscriminate pruning of a crepe myrtle could be classified as crepe murder, but the worst offenders are those who shorten tall crepe myrtles by six feet, turning beautiful trunks into thick, ugly stubs. This atrocity is often perpetrated with a chainsaw with the offender making blunt cuts across all the trunks of the tree and cutting them to the same uniform height.

We inherited a lovely crepe myrtle—luckily large enough to shade the house, and not close enough to threaten it. But I found this article not in reading about my own tree, but in trying to figure out why some of the folks in our neighborhood were doing this:

Done right, something like this is called pollarding, but folks seemed to disagree over whether pollarding is good for trees, and whether this qualifies as pollarding at all. I don’t like it; I don’t see any point to it unless the tree is diseased or is encroaching on a window or roof, or blocking a driveway. Maybe some of these were, but they look healthy and in fine locations to me.

Related Reading:

New and Old #8

New and Old #9

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